The Titanic Awards

Name Patrick Smith
Who? A commercial airline pilot, air travel columnist and author.  His book, Ask the Pilot: Everything You Need to Know about Air Travel, received critical acclaim.  He lives near Boston and always asks for a window seat. More at askthepilot.com and his photos can be found here on flickr
Age 42
Countries Visited 70+

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Passenger Back when I was flying 15-seaters without lavatories, the man who urinated into an airsickness bag, then handed it to me on his way out the door.
2. Worst Flight Northwest DC-10 from Boston to Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1988.  This was back when you could still smoke on airplanes, and we managed to score a pair of middle seats in the heart of the smoking section.  Nine hours later I needed a new set of clothes and a lung transplant.
3.  Worst Rip-Off This award is shared by the various five-star international hotels that insist on charging exorbitant fees for Internet access  At the Athens Hilton Wi-Fi is $30 a day!   (And a Coke from the minibar is $8.50)
4. Worst Tourist Office Plovidv, Bulgaria.  The booth was open two hours a day and they didn’t speak English.  I don’t think they spoke Bulgarian.
5. Worst City for Driving Cairo, hands down.  A stupefying anarchy of horns and fenders.  How there aren’t dozens of daily casualties in this city is beyond me.  Oh, wait… there are.
6. Worst Airport Airports can vary tremendously terminal to terminal, but here’s my answer:  Leopold Sedar Senghor International Airport, in Dakar, Senegal.  They’ve opened a new check-in area, but still it’s an awful place.  An armed guard watches over a lone that doesn’t work, and moth-sized mosquitoes breed in the bathrooms.
7. Worst Landing Not a fair question.  I tell people that judging a flight by a rough landing is like judging a book by a single misplaced punctuation mark.  From a pilot’s point of view, there is so much that goes into a flight, and to judge everything by the smoothness of a touchdown is unfair.  Especially when some landings are intentionally firm, such as those on shorter runways.  That’s my excuse, anyway, for those times when I bang it on.

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Name Norie Quintos
Who? Senior editor at National Geographic Traveler, specializing in consumer travel news, guided tours, and family travel. Former jobs include travel reporter at U.S. News & World Report and senior editor at Caribbean Travel & Life magazine. Find Norie on Twitter
Age 45
Countries Visited About 25

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Meal At a restaurant in Rome, I urged my kids to order a panini—“it’s authentic,” I assured them. What they got: three halves of hotdog in a hamburger bun.
2. Worst Tour In Rekjavik, Iceland, I signed up for an eight-hour “Golden Circle” minibus tour. Problem was, it was December and there were only six hours of daylight. The first two hours of the tour were conducted in near-total darkness, with the guide blithely describing the passing geologic and historical highlights no one could see, “On your left is the Hengill volcano… And here, on the right is a geothermal plant…. ” Adding to the Twilight-Zone-iness of it all was that no one else seemed to think it was odd.
3. Worst Flight Regional flight from Shiraz to Isfahan on Iran Air Tour, a subsidiary of the Iranian national airline. The Tu-154s was a leased Aeroflot aircraft. The plane’s obvious age, seemingly rickety condition, and Soviet styling made me wonder if we’d arrive in one piece. But we did.
4. Another Worst Flight I took a charter flight from Darwin, Australia, to a lodge in Arnhem Land. The plane turned out to be a two-seater. It was just the pilot—who looked awfully young—and me in the jumpseat. Halfway into the flight, he asked me to pull out the map. He peered at it and flew on. A little later he asked me if that area below looked like the marked spot on the map. At that moment it dawned on me that the guy had never been to where we were going before. Then I started to panic and wondered if he’d ever flown solo before; he assured me he had. Now, those who are familiar with my sense of misdirection would never ask me to navigate, but we somehow managed to locate the airstrip. To top off this surreal adventure, after we landed I had to get out and help park the plane by pushing it under some trees.
5. Worst Photography Moment My regular camera broke soon after I arrived for a South African safari. So I bought several disposable film cameras at a gift shop in Johannesburg. On the first morning’s game drive, the jeep was full of wannabe photo pros jostling each other with their mongo-lensed Nikons. And there I was snapping away with the $10 plastic camera. The best part was telling them where I worked—National Geographic. You could just see those guys wondering if maybe I was employing some kind of super-secret photography technique.

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Name Joe Sharkey
Who? Formerly a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, a reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal and, for 13 years, a columnist for the New York Times. He is the author of six books, two in development as movies. He is currently working on a book about air travel called — what else? — High Anxiety.  Check out his blog
Age 62
Countries Visited 40+

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Flight I was flying over the Amazon in a small plane with five passengers and — KABOOM — there’s this atomic concussion.  I look out the window and five feet of the wing is missing.  Then we start losing altitude. We all think we’re going to die. So I mentally say good-bye to my family and friends. Fifteen minutes go by and we still haven’t crashed yet, but I’ve said my good-byes to everyone. So I start thinking that this is going to hurt. I dwell on that for a while. The plane will explode and I’m going catch on fire.* Then out of nowhere appears a tiny airfield and we manage to plop down on it. Turns out it’s a secret military base that wasn’t expecting us. We’re met by lots of people pointing guns and detained. And there’s no cell phone coverage here. And they don’t know what has happened. At that point, neither did we. Our theory was that another plane higher up had exploded and we hit their debris. What actually happened was that we were hit by another, much larger 737, and that plane tragically went down and 154 people died. We found out several hours later.
Worst Festival  Pikeville, Kentucky has this Hillbilly Days festival. The well-off people dress up as hillbillies and drive around in floats depicting things like hillbilly front yards with an outhouse.  Who’s watching? The actual hillbillies. They come in from the hills and make up the spectators. I noticed there was no bluegrass music in the festival and asked the hillbilly next to me about it. He said: “anyone who can play the banjo got fuck out of here.”
2. Worst Hotel Wildwood, New Jersey has a great beach and cool-looking art-deco hotels. But they’re all terrible. Especially this place called Eden Roc. It’s run by this notoriously nasty woman who fights with the guests. Even TripAdvisor says to stay away. Best decoration detail was the beer bottle on the bottom of the pool.
3. Worst Toilet Top floor bathroom of  Port Authority bus terminal before the mid-1990s. If you went in, someone would follow you… to mug you, sell you drugs, something.. I learned to pee fast and look menacing while I was peeing — not easy to do.
4. Worst Meal About12 years ago, my wife and I were in Casablanca. Everyone said I have try the pigeon pie, so we got a recommendation for a place that specializes in it. We were the only ones in the restaurant. The pie had this flaky pastry covering it, but beneath it looked like roadkill — most roadkill doesn’t look this bad. My eyes said no, my mouth said no, but I ate it anyway (my wife sensibly avoided it). I was deathly ill the next day.

*I told my doctor this some months later and he said “It wouldn’t have hurt.” And I replied “How the fuck do you know?”

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Name Johnny Jet (a.k.a John E. DiScala)
Who? He travels roughly 150,000 miles and visits about 20 countries each year. He and his website  www.JohnnyJet.com have been featured over 1,500 times in major publications including Outside Magazine, which listed him as having one of the world’s best “dream jobs.”
Age 39
Countries Visited 60, plus or minus 5

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Place I’ve Been Tijuana.  This was even before all the violence.  Place is dirty, depressing and full of scam artists.
2. Worst Flight Sun Air in Fiji before they got their newer, larger planes.  Everything was smooth on my puddle jump ride to Savusavu until we went over the mountain range.  We hit turbulence, an alarm went off, the plane dropped and I had to pound my heart a couple of times to start that sucker back up once we flattened out. When we landed I not only kissed the ground, I made out with it.
3. Worst Touristy Thing I Did A Desert Safari in Abu Dhabi.  Sat in the very back seat (where kids are supposed to sit) and got so car sick bashing the sand dunes that I begged and tried to bribe the driver to let me out. I get nauseous writing about it.
4. Worst Taxi Ride Nagpur, India to Madhya Pradesh. Craziest 90-kilometer, two-and-a-half-hour drive you will ever do.  Everyone is passing, even on blind turns. Huge overloaded trucks, packed buses, tuk-tuks, scooters with entire families, cyclists, free-roaming livestock, dogs, monkeys, street hawkers, beggars and pedestrians. Technically, there are lanes, but no one seems to stay in them. It’s a free for all.
5. Worst Beach Condado Beach, San Juan, Puerto Rico. While I was there, a 13-year-old boy drowned. As the rescue team searched for his body well into the next day, another man swimming there also drowned, right next to the searchers.

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